Tommy Tomlinson on the core elements of storytelling:

Thanks for having me here today. I want this to be more of a conversation than a speech. I don’t need much time for a speech, because today I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

But first I want to tell you a little story.

My wife (Alix Felsing, Storyboard’s copyeditor) has this uncanny gift for finding the worst possible movie on TV at any given moment. The other night she landed on the SyFy channel, on this movie called Collision Earth.

I’m gonna try to come up with a quick synopsis that does this movie justice.

The event that gets the action going is a solar flare so powerful that it knocks the planet Mercury out of its orbit and sends it hurtling toward Earth. This would be bad.

Along with knocking Mercury out of its orbit, somehow this solar flare also magnetized Mercury, so as it heads for Earth, cars and stuff start flying into the air to meet it.

There’s ONE scientist who knows how to fix this. In fact he has built this giant battering ram in space for just this situation. But for reasons I never did quite follow, this scientist was fired from NASA years before, and his giant battering ram was unfinished and left out in space to rot, and now, of course, NOBODY WILL LISTEN TO HIM.

It just so happens that this disgraced scientist’s wife is an astronaut whose spacecraft is — you won’t believe this — orbiting Mercury. But the solar flare hit the ship so hard that a little while later, the other astronaut on board keels over and dies.

So he’s on the ground trying to save Earth, and she’s up in space trying to save Earth, and they’re actually talking to each other via ham radio — I don’t even wanna get into how THAT happened.

There’s not nearly enough time to tell you all the ways this movie is ludicrous, so I’ll give you just two:

One, this giant magnetized planet that’s flying toward us is just sucking cars off the earth, EXCEPT when the disgraced scientist needs a car to get somewhere; then his car stays on the ground just fine, even as other cars are being sucked off the planet right in front of him.

And two, this astronaut up there, when she needs to move around the spaceship, she doesn’t float through the capsule in zero gravity … she just gets up and walks around like she’s at the mall.

I have only scratched the surface of how stupid on every level this movie is. But we watched the damn thing all the way to the end. When it was over, I looked at my wife and said, “Why did we do that?” But the truth is, I knew why.

And here’s where I tell you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

Ten years ago I bought a copy of the annual Best American Magazine Writing collection. It contained a story called “Hollywood’s Information Man,” by Amy Wallace, originally published in Los Angeles magazine. I was just out of college then, working my first daily newspaper job, and this story knocked me over. It showed the astonishing possibilities of a magazine story, the combination of wit and humor and investigative reporting that an expert could weave under just the right circumstances. Now, over at Nieman Storyboyard, Elon Green has done a version of Paige Williams’ Annotation Tuesday with Amy Wallace on the piece. If you’re just starting out, this is a road map for success. And if you’re a veteran looking for a spark, it just might fire you back up. Take a look.

Steve Friedman (thanks, Don D.): You know what people think. They see jeans too short and winter coat too shiny, too grimy, and think, homeless. They watch a credit card emerge from those jeans and think, grifter. They behold a frozen grin, hear a string of strangled, tortured pauses, and think, slow. Stupid.

You learned too young about cruelty and pity. You learned too young that explaining yourself didn’t help, that it made things worse. People laughed. Made remarks. Backed away. So you stopped explaining. You got a job, got a cat, got an apartment, and people can think what they want to think. You built a life without explanation and it was enough.

What people see now, this moment, is a solitary man leaning into the wind, trudging down snow-dusted streets toward a faint, watery dawn.

GBSNP Varma at a hospice in India:

Rajamma weathers these episodes one dreaded night after another. Time, for him, is measured in breaths.

What does he like about his wife?

“Goodness,” he says, after a gasp and sigh, looking toward the ceiling.

“Patience,” he says after a gasp again. They have not travelled much together. It was always work and home. “Lot of work,” he says.

Dan Stockman:

FORT WAYNE – Four times, doctors said Sandy Koeneman was dying. Four times, they tried to tell her husband, Richard, that this was the end.

Richard wasn’t ready to let go.

“When you love somebody so much, they’re your whole life,” Richard explains. “Without her, I’d have nothing.”

Four times, Richard asked the doctors to do everything they could to save her, and each time, they did.

By now – after all they’ve been through, after all the close calls in the last few years – you might think Richard would be prepared to say goodbye to his wife of 51 years.

But he’s not. Not at the north-side home they’ve shared for decades, not at the nursing home where she gets 24-hour care.

“When we get her home, we’ll get her up in the wheelchair every day and get her out in the backyard where there’s lots of flowers and sunshine,” Richard says over the wave-like sound of the ventilator that breathes for Sandy. “The main thing is we’ll be together all the time.”

How does he find hope in the face of such odds?

Easy – Sandy, 71, has been dying for 40 years.

Fairly amazing story by Dan Zak on a nun and two male companions who breached security at a nuclear facility in the name of God:

The devil was just over Pine Ridge.

From the deserted parking lot on the edge of town, the three servants of God looked into darkness.

They clicked on their flashlights, pushed through the initial thicket of brush and began their trek, aiming for the black wooded slope.

First, the house painter: bearded, calm, quiet.

Second, the Catholic nun: gentle, grandmotherly, short of breath.

Third, the drifter: alert, intense, shouldering supplies.

They crept across the marshy field, led by some combination of God and Google Maps. Behind them was the city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., 30 minutes west of Knoxville. On the other side of Pine Ridge was Bear Creek Valley — cradle of the Y-12 National Security Complex, the “Fort Knox of Uranium,” birthplace of the heart of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima 67 years earlier.

It was, the house painter would later recall, as if the Almighty were guiding each step, across 1,000 feet of open field and up an embankment.

Congratulations to our friend Brian Mockenhaupt, whose Byliner Original “The Living and the Dead” is a National Magazine Award finalist.

Below the Virgin was a kind of converted glove box, and in it were a Smith & Wesson .45-caliber revolver, a roll of bandage, a bottle of iodine, a vial of lavender smelling salts, and an unopened pint of whisky. With this equipment Juan felt fairly confident he could meet most situations.

John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus, page 21.

Congratulations to Mark Johnson, winner of the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.

Last night on Twitter, emboldened by a combination of Pamela Colloff and Woodford Reserve, Ben was moved to declare, “All you sports folks, I love what most of you do, but there are innocent people on death row. Redirect your energy.”

He has since retreated from the statement. (Most of us, including myself, have tweeted something we wished we could un-tweet.) But I think it brings up several important questions. Why do you do this work? How often is it just a job, a series of tasks in exchange for money and a byline, and how often does it feel like a calling? When thinking about what story to pursue, how often does the question of “HOW WILL THIS MAKE THE WORLD BETTER” come into play? Is it enough to do an honest night’s work for an honest night’s pay? Or do we all need to find a way to right a wrong with our work?